Episode 1760 Scott Adams: Come Diagnose My Opinions As COVID-Addled Or Brilliant. I Need Help
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
144.53938
Summary
This will not be a normal live stream, no, today you are the judge to see if my brain fog has lifted yet. You will be the judge because you know who can t tell? Me. You, the judge! You will produce my usual superb analysis and clearly demonstrate that my brain is working at 100% or will it be lacking a little bit?
Transcript
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Oh, good morning, everybody, and welcome to either the best show in the history of civilization
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or an embarrassing COVID-addled brain demonstration that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
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It's going to be one of those two things, and you, ladies and gentlemen, and everything
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in between, you are the judges and the juries for this presentation.
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Today, you are the judge to see if my brain fog from my COVID has lifted yet.
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You will be the judge because you know who can't tell?
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So will I produce my usual superb analysis and clearly demonstrate that my brain is working
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Those of you who have watched me a little while, you be the judge.
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Now, if you'd like to get this off to a good start, I know you do, all you do is a cup
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or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice, a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of
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The dopamine to the day thing makes everything better.
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and you're about to enjoy it.
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Well, catching you up, if you did not know, I tested positive for COVID on Saturday.
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Today is Tuesday, and I thought I'd give you an update.
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And so, just before I came on here, I took another test to see if I still have the COVID.
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Does anybody want to look at this test and tell me the answer?
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Because I couldn't see it from where it was laying there.
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I'm going to show it to the locals people first.
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I believe I have now passed into some kind of ultra COVID situation.
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You know, ultra MAGA was impressive, but ultra COVID, boom, that's what I got.
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Now, when I want to not spend time around people, instead of making excuses, like, oh, I have to work, or, you know, whatever.
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This will be like a cross that gets rid of vampires.
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So I think this will keep me lonely for a while.
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But let me give you the update on the symptoms.
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Second day, I would say the symptoms were gone 70% by the second day.
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Day three, it looked like it was another 70% or so.
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I had a sudden, almost unnatural recovery that happened within a few hours.
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So what drug did I take, or what medicine or medicines did I take, that caused me to go from really, you know, head foggy, tired, couldn't move, basically.
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And then suddenly, boom, I didn't have any symptoms at all that I could identify.
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Here's everything you need to know about everything you've ever heard about what works and what doesn't work with COVID.
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I didn't do anything that should have made a difference.
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Smoked weed, drank coffee, which I do every day.
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So remember I told you that when I first contracted it, it was obvious it was COVID.
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I mean, if anybody had been paying attention, it was obvious.
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And part of why it was obvious is that I'd never felt anything like it.
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It just didn't feel like a normal illness at all, because it affected my brain.
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Any kind of illness that directly affected your cognition?
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There were simple things that I couldn't figure out.
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You should have seen me try to send a text message.
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There was a period when it was sort of peaking in intensity.
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When I would type a text message and I would look at it, it would literally just be random letters.
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And I'd look at it and say, oh, I guess I had been like one over or something.
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Sometimes your keyboard hand is like one letter over.
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And I'd look at it again and be like, still not even close to words.
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You wouldn't even know what word I was intending.
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But fortunately, Google knows how to translate your misspellings to real words.
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I think every word I tried to spell was misspelled.
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believes that they had a miraculous recovery because of what they did on the third day.
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And I had a miraculous recovery that didn't look natural.
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The fact that all of my symptoms went away within just a few hours,
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instead of sort of gradually wearing off, nothing like that happened.
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The body ache and the symptoms came on within one hour when I got it.
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And when they left, it felt like they left in an hour.
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I'm not saying that means it was an engineered virus.
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But I've never felt anything that came on that fast or left that quickly after two and a half days.
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So now, imagine if I had successfully gotten the Paxlovid drug
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that I had initially thought about but was too mentally incompetent to make it happen.
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Later, I changed my mind and decided I'd be better off writing it out.
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I would have gotten it and taken it just hours before all of my symptoms went away on their own.
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Would I have recommended to you that you take Paxlovid?
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Because if I felt that bad for two and a half days,
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and within hours of taking a particular drug, I felt completely better,
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you don't think I would recommend you take that drug?
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Make sure you're not taking any medical advice from this.
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What I'm trying to tell you is that anything you heard about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine,
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Anything you heard where somebody's symptoms, you know, very quickly turned around,
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how can you distinguish that from what happened with me?
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Now, how many of you had a similar situation where you didn't take anything that should have helped
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Yeah, you see in the comments, in the locals, it's a little faster.
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So everything that you heard about something that definitely worked, no way to know.
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And then, of course, today there's an article, of course, about Paxlovid.
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So that's the pill you take, one of the pills you take if you have symptoms.
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And it says that you can get a rebound thing and still be contagious after you take it and blah, blah, blah.
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I watched the Norm MacDonald special, the one he recorded just in his house before he passed.
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It was disturbing because you knew he was so close to his death and that he knew it when he was doing it.
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Now, here's a story I've told some of you, you've heard before, and I can tell it because he's passed.
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And apparently he had followed me to some degree.
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I think he may have read one of my books or something.
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And I think he might have seen my live streams.
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So he contacted me on Twitter, I think, and asked if I would take a call.
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So I talked to him, and I didn't know that he was dealing with a, you know, terminal cancer.
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So apparently he had some kind of ongoing pain that drugs weren't doing the job for, for whatever reason.
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And he asked me if hypnosis would be a potential solution to that.
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So I told him what I knew about it, which is some people do get some relief from hypnosis.
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I'm not going to say it's going to work on every kind of pain and every situation.
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But you hear enough reports about people, anecdotally, who feel like they handled their pain.
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And so because I had that little bit of encounter with him, and then after the fact I realized how meaningful it was, I mean, I thought it was plenty terrible that he had to deal with this chronic pain.
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I didn't know how bad it was or that it was part of a terminal situation.
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So I found it hard to watch, but I recommend it highly because you do see, you know, one of the greatest of all time putting out some material you haven't seen before.
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I also watched Ricky Gervais, his new stand-up special that the trans community is getting up in arms for.
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And it's kind of interesting because he says so directly that these are just jokes and that he says things just for effect.
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You know, he pauses and says, you know, I just say this for effect, right?
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But the fact is that some things do offend people, just the topic itself.
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You know, it just feels like you're making it too easy to mock them or something.
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So I felt that this is one time that Ricky Gervais was trying a little too hard to be Dave Chappelle.
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I hate to say that, but that's what it felt like.
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Because remember how impressive it was when Chappelle handled, you know, basically a similar situation.
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But when Chappelle did his special, it was just sort of a genius.
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You know, and it showed that somebody could talk about complicated emotional topics and still make it all work.
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And I felt like Gervais wanted to enter that same space.
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But I felt like it was a little forced, that's all.
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I felt like he was trying to get into that space more than he was trying to just make us laugh.
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So it felt like there was a burden on the writing.
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So in terms of things you could watch that would entertain you, yeah, yeah, you should watch it.
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So Jeffrey Goldberg, who may or may not have ever promoted any hoaxes in his past, tweeted this.
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He said, a reminder that on Memorial Day 2017, Donald Trump and John Kelly, his chief of staff, visited the Arlington National Cemetery grave of Kelly's son, a fallen Marine officer.
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Trump turned to Kelly and said, quote, I don't get it.
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So that's what Jeffrey Goldberg says happened in 2017.
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Mark Hemingway countered with a tweet of his own saying, a reminder, more than 20 people with knowledge of what occurred with Trump on this trip went on record to say Goldberg's anonymously sourced story is bunk.
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Now, did you believe even for a second that this was true?
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Do you believe that Trump would have stood next to a grave with Kelly and, you know, where his fallen Marine son was and turned to Kelly and said, I don't get it.
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Does that even sound a little bit like something he would do?
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Like, even if you assume the worst things about Trump are true, he's always been respectful to the military.
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Has anybody been more consistent in being respectful to the military in all the ways that he can figure out how to do it, right?
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I mean, even if he missed a salute here or there, I don't know, maybe he did.
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But clearly his intentions have been so consistent for years and years.
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And I can't believe anybody tried to promote that one.
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When I put out my hoax quiz, they had 10 popular hoaxes on it.
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And I invited you to borrow it so you could share it with people who tried to argue with you online.
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But if they believe any of those 10 hoaxes, you can say to yourself, I'm not dealing with a clever person here.
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But I was one-upped by a user who said, 10, here's my list of, I don't know, 25 or 30 hoaxes.
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If I were trying to convince you, let's say a Democrat, that the Democrat side was doing a lot of hoaxing and that it makes a big difference in how they see the world, would I be more convincing with 30 or with 10?
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Now, I say probably because I think you'd have to do like a proper scientific study to know which really makes a difference.
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Could be that the bigger number influences people.
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If you only do 10, you can make sure that you pick the 10 that are the strongest cases.
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If you pick 30, you will necessarily have things that are weaker than whatever your best 10 was, right?
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So your goal would be to have the most number without getting into any weak ones.
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Because when I looked at the list of 30, even I said, that's not a hoax.
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So I'm completely on the side of the hoaxes being hoaxes, but even I didn't believe the list of 30.
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Like I'm completely primed to believe that the Democrats are hoaxing everything.
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The list of 10 is hard enough to believe as it is.
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Because you want people to see that there are like eight things on there that even they know are hoaxes.
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And then there are two on there that they think were real.
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If the other eight are fake, maybe these other two are fake too.
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So the laundry list persuasion is one you need to guard against when somebody is using it against you.
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Because if somebody has a list, you just sort of think something on that list must be true.
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But if you want to be the one who's the persuasive one, then using the laundry list persuasion actually, unfortunately, it works.
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I'm not sure it's the most ethical thing you could ever do, but it works.
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Now in this case, it's ethical, in my opinion, because everything on the list is true, as far as I know.
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And the purpose of promoting it is to make the world smarter and better.
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Yes, and has somebody said here, if there's one cat that doesn't belong in your house, you might be able to get rid of it.
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But if there are ten cats, you're going to have to deal with the root cause.
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You know, there's maybe a root problem here or something.
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Elon Musk is sort of doubling down on his voting Republican.
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But he said that he has a reason for why the Democrats may have turned so negative lately.
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And apparently some of that negativity is hitting him.
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He says that there was somebody who donated lots of money to political action committees posing as charities,
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and that all that money is causing a lot of negativity to come into the system.
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And that the person who donated all that money was Jeff Bezos' ex-wife.
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And so Musk is, like, directly saying that her money has changed things into a bad thing,
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and so much so that he's escaping the Democrats.
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And Musk says that it's true that Tesla was attacked by Romney in two or three presidential debates.
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But he says those lines were fed to him by a particular individual in the oil and gas industry.
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So Musk knows a lot about what's behind the curtain.
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Like, he even knows the person who gave Romney the talking points.
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And he says, given the unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me, meaning Musk,
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and a very cold shoulder to Tesla and SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November.
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I love the fact that he's using his own vote as a public political weapon.
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Imagine if I went public and said, I'm going to change my vote.
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But when the richest person in the world says he's going to change his vote and then shows his work,
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I mean, I don't know how much, but, like, I know I couldn't or anybody else.
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But I think he could actually move the needle by saying, if you don't act better, I'll vote for the other team.
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Now, what is it that Democrat voters get wrong all the time?
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What Democrat voters get wrong all the time is they'll vote for their team no matter what the team does.
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I suppose you could argue that Republicans do that, too.
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But if people are just team voters, we're doomed.
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So the richest, maybe one of the smartest people in the world, just show Democrats how they can retake power.
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Stop voting for the people that are screwing you.
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Stop voting for the people who are just screwing you?
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Like, they're screwing you right in front of you.
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They're not even pretending they're not screwing you.
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I mean, they're screwing Musk, like, right in front of his face.
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Now, I love the fact that he's not saying, I love Republicans and I endorse all their policies.
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He's literally just punishing Democrats for being assholes.
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Because simply saying stuff doesn't really change things.
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And he's willing to change his vote to vote for a team that has policies that I think, just guessing, he hates.
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Because, you know, I don't think he's a conservative.
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So don't you think there are some conservative policies, some Republican policies that he probably hates.
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But he's still going to vote for them to punish the Democrats.
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If he taught the whole country to do that, just punish your team if they're obviously just abusing you.
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So every time he makes a move, it has like a societal impact that's hard to judge.
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A robot that can plant your seeds and water it.
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And it can pick the weeds and it can fertilize it exactly the right amount.
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Basically, every kind of plant will get its own special treatment.
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And I thought to myself, I believe that there's a 10x improvement in indoor farming that we're going to see in the next few years.
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And all you need to do is be able to build a cheaper structure, the indoor part.
00:24:05.840
So if we can figure out how to make a durable, easy structure, that would be half of it.
00:24:12.920
Then the robots will get rid of the labor, because they can work all day long and they can do it perfectly.
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I think the robot could probably even squash a bug.
00:24:38.820
So I think the yields, and they'll also, I think, learn to grow better vertically.
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Because they don't have the vertical thing down as well as they could.
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So I think there's going to be better mirrors, better lighting, cheaper electricity, fusion, who knows.
00:24:55.980
But whatever they do, I think there's going to be a 10x improvement in indoor farming.
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And that will make us a lot safer the next time there's a food shortage.
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Speaking of food shortage, we have two gigantic problems in the world.
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One is that wheat looks like it's going to be greatly constrained.
00:25:18.900
So the supply of wheat will be so constrained that poor countries will, are predicted to have starvation.
00:25:38.860
Well, you know, other things too, but too much bread.
00:25:44.280
So if we have rich countries who have too much bread, it's making them unhealthy.
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And you have poor countries who are going to starve because they don't have enough wheat.
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Is there no way we can solve two problems at the same time?
00:26:04.220
But it's such a big problem, I feel like, you know, you could make those adjustments.
00:26:16.720
Now, somebody said, you can't take bread away from, you know, the rich.
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To which I say, well, if it's not on the shelves, what are they going to be fighting to keep?
00:26:27.820
So I feel as if the biggest category in my supermarket is bread.
00:26:41.580
So maybe the reason that it looks like an emergency, but we're not treating it like one, is that it isn't one.
00:26:50.700
Maybe people just adjust what they eat and everything's fine.
00:26:57.820
But the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky, says that the open office plan for, you know, cubicles or non-cubicles, I should say, is dead.
00:27:11.880
And that the old way of the open floor plan with these meeting rooms that everyone's waiting in line to get in and no one can find a meeting room, all of that is, I think, a thing of the past.
00:27:22.500
So people will be trying to redesign the office of the future, and it might include coming in for a week every quarter to, you know, bond.
00:27:37.760
I mean, I tried to kill cubicles for 33 years, but it looks like it took COVID to do it.
00:27:46.500
Now, cubicles will probably always, because they're cheap.
00:27:50.320
As long as they're cheap, they're just still going to be used.
00:27:53.400
There will be some cool high-tech companies that try other things and then give up on them later.
00:27:58.100
It seems to me that Biden, his strategy for Ukraine is now clear.
00:28:05.920
For a while, it was a little murky, but now it's clear.
00:28:12.080
It's basically the same as the Afghanistan strategy, which you could call losing expensively.
00:28:22.920
But there's also spending way too much money to do it.
00:28:28.100
Now, winning would look like winning economically.
00:28:35.120
But if you're losing and you're spending way too much money to do it, that's sort of the Afghanistan strategy.
00:28:52.020
Here's another example of wanting versus deciding.
00:28:55.060
You know how we were trying to decide what is it that Putin really wants with Ukraine?
00:29:00.780
Does he want the whole country or does he want the region he's consolidating now?
00:29:08.640
It was like, well, he sort of acted like he wanted the whole country, but maybe that was a fake-out.
00:29:20.000
It's the difference between what you want and what you decide.
00:29:24.960
I believe Putin decided to take over those territories he's taking over right now.
00:29:31.140
Meaning that once he had decided, there was no price he was unwilling to pay.
00:29:37.060
It looks like he would be willing to pay any price to take over those territories.
00:29:43.740
And as I told you before, if he ever decides he wants any part of Ukraine, he's going to have it.
00:29:50.960
Because he will be able to take however much pain it takes, and then he'll just have it.
00:29:57.760
Any amount of cruelty, any amount of loss of life for Russians, any amount of military degradation,
00:30:04.020
any amount of sanctions, apparently he's just going to do it.
00:30:08.220
But, did he think the same way about all of Ukraine and Kyiv?
00:30:15.740
I think all of Ukraine is something he wanted, but he had not decided on it.
00:30:21.820
And that when it looked like it was hard to get, he said, well, okay.
00:30:26.360
You know, it kept their army pinned down, and so it did his job.
00:30:32.180
So I think the wanting versus deciding frame helps analyze that one.
00:30:42.480
Here's the most optimistic, stupid thing you've ever heard in your life.
00:30:47.220
You've got a big problem with national debt, am I right?
00:30:53.460
You'd like to solve that, don't you, wouldn't you?
00:31:15.000
Now, don't get me started on why that's a bad idea.
00:31:27.120
that probably the only way to get rid of a debt this big
00:31:31.340
but you want to do it with, you know, a reasonable level of inflation.
00:31:36.200
You don't want to do it with runaway inflation.
00:31:45.400
because we'll probably never be able to pay it down.
00:31:58.920
But, you know, if you're up to 8% a year in inflation
00:32:22.800
I'm pretty sure that you want a small amount of inflation
00:32:34.540
Canadians, it looks like they're proposing this legislation
00:32:40.420
meaning that you wouldn't be able to buy another handgun
00:33:27.220
attacked by a tyrant who wanted to occupy the country,
00:33:45.680
Because we're not going to let Canada go under.
00:33:53.900
you might think that Americans are kind of assholes,